You probably wouldn’t know it to look at this, but Terry Cavanagh’s favourite games have always been JRPGs. And for the longest time, he’s been working on one with writer Jonas Kyratzes called Nexus City. That became a sprawling, many-limbed beast, and so the two decided to chop one of its limbs off and serve that as a more manageable spin-off game: Selma’s Story.
Selma’s Story was 2012’s New Year’s Resolution. Now Cavanagh has killed both games to rid himself of their self-inflicted pressure.
Though Cavanagh resolved to make Selma’s Story last year, in reality he spent only two months working on it and hasn’t worked on Nexus City proper since 2011.
“That said, even though it’s not a project I’m actively spending much of my time on, Nexus City has weighed heavily on my mind,” he writes on his blog.
“I’ve been thinking of Nexus City as ‘the thing I’m working on’ since 2010. As a result, for a long time now, I’ve felt like I wasn’t really in control of what I can work on. Promising games would come along, and I’d stop myself from getting too deep into them, because I had to finish Nexus City first.”
Cavanagh has decided that’s “creatively unhealthy”. And it took the conception of Super Hexagon to finally extract the RPG opus from his thoughts and replace it with primary-coloured shapes.
“Nexus City is an amazing world with an amazing story, and there were times when I was completely obsessed with it,” he continues. “But the momentum is long gone now, and at this point I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I need to move on to other things.”
First on the agenda is a nice, long break. Terry? I recommend starting with the daily highlights from Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight – PC gaming’s best impersonation of the HBO boxset.